“I sat, eased a few M&M’s into my mouth, and flipped to page 132, which turned out to be ‘Good in Bed,’ Moxie’s regular male-written feature designed to help the average reader understand what her boyfriend was up to… or wasn’t up to, as the case might be. At first my eyes wouldn’t make sense of the letters. Finally, they unscrambled. ‘Loving a Larger Woman,’ said the headline, ‘By Bruce Guberman.’ Bruce Guberman had been my boyfriend for just over three years, until we’d decided to take a break three months ago. And the Larger Woman, I could only assume, was me.
You know how in scary books a character will say, ‘I felt my heart stop?’ Well, I did. Really. Then I felt it start to pound again, in my wrists, my throat, my fingertips. The hair at the back of my neck stood up. My hands felt icy. I could hear the blood roaring in my ears, as I read as I read the first line of the article: ‘I’ll never forget the day I found out my girlfriend weighed more than i did.’”(Weiner 4)
In close reading this passage, I was able to identify many literary devices that Jennifer Weiner uses in order to move the reader along with the story, making it easier to read. For instance, the diction in the beginning of the passage introduces a relaxed tone, using words such as “sat” or “eased.” With these words, the reader can understand that Cannie is relaxed and comfortable wherever it is she may be sitting, as she begins to eat candy. The amount of punctuational pauses are minimal, drawing out the sentences and slowing the reader down in order to relax the reader. However, as Cannie begins to understand what she is looking at, the pauses become more frequent, and the sentences become short and choppy, almost as if the sentences are moving with her heartbeat. You can see the structural sentence shift, to the shorter choppier sentences at “Finally, they unscrambled”(4). The pauses that she incorporates in her sentences build drama, and move the reader with her writing. The paragraph break is another example of a structural shift, as the explains that she felt her “heart stop”(4). The significance in the paragraph break lies in her realization that Bruce had been talking about her in his article, and the break is a literal pause, almost as though as she processes what she has just realized, the reader does as well. Weiner then continues the pattern of frequent pausing in her sentences, in order to build suspense, while Cannie becomes angry, feeling her heart pound “in [her] wrists, [her] throat, [and her] fingertips”(4). As previously explained, through her structural shifts, punctual placement, and sentence structure, Weiner makes this passage very easy to close read. The reader is able to move with the literature, and at the same time is able to understand and feel the text on a deeper level.